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Bosnian Croat pleads guilty to war crimes

Posted on: Tuesday, 19 July 2005, 09:39 CDT

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A former Bosnian Croat soldier changed his plea on Tuesday to guilty on charges including murder, rape and torture of Muslims during the 1993 Muslim-Croat war in central Bosnia.

"I'm guilty and I'm honestly sorry," Miroslav Bralo, also known as Cicko, told the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague when he was asked how he pleaded to eight counts of war crimes and human rights abuses in an amended indictment.

Prosecutors say Bralo, 37, belonged to a Bosnian Croat special forces unit known as the Jokers which attacked Muslim villages in Bosnia in 1993. It subsequently imprisoned civilians and forced them to dig trenches and serve as "human shields."

Bralo is accused of repeatedly raping a Muslim woman, who was kept prisoner for about a month. Prosecutors say he also made Muslim prisoners perform Catholic rituals and tortured others by forcing them to drink salt water before killing them.

Bralo, who surrendered to the tribunal last November, pleaded not guilty to the original indictment issued in 1995 which included nine counts of grave breaches of the Geneva conventions and 12 of violations of laws and customs of war.

But Bralo agreed an unconditional plea bargain with U.N. prosecutors on a simplified indictment that added the charge of persecution, a crime against humanity, for involvement in a massacre of more than 100 Muslims in Ahmici in April 1993.

Bralo said he understood the implications of pleading guilty and said he had not been coerced into changing his plea. The court said it accepted his plea and would hold a judgment hearing on Oct. 10.

Source: REUTERS

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